Dash should organize installed apps by categories

[Šimánek]

Binary package hint: unity

When in Dash, if you click the "more apps" button, you are presented with an alphabetically sorted list of all installed applications. These should be sorted into groups/categories similar to those found in the Gnome Menu: Office, Graphics, Games and especially Preferences and System. Right now the biggest problem is that Preferences and System "apps" are mixed in with things more traditionally considered applications. I don't think most people think of System Preference dialogs as applications. They think of them as System Preferences.

[Omer Akram (om26er)]

>> I don't think most people think of System Preference dialogs as applications

bug 746784

[Omer Akram (om26er)]

iirc, some changes are planned for the Dash home screen for Oneiric, this bug might just become obsolete with that. status incomplete as we wait for the Design people.

[Ben Shadwick (benshadwick)]

Considering that this is the main interface that everyone is going to see first when trying to launch apps via Unity, I see this as a serious usability issue and am both concerned and greatly disappointed to see that it has been so quickly wishlisted :( For me personally, this usability issue resulted in replacing Unity with GNOME 3 (plus KDE, LXDE and XFCE for fun) on one of my two Ubuntu 11.04 boxes.

I also just found out that you can supposedly right-click the application lens (or launcher or whatever it is called) to get a category list. This might be seen as an acceptable workaround/implementation, but I never thought to try that because it is unintuitive! I'm also wondering how touchscreen users would access that, although I myself am not one of them.

[Ben Shadwick (benshadwick)]

Bug #720478 appears to have brought up the same issue, but I don't see evidence of the fix claimed as the basis for marking it as Invalid.